After a morning spent stripping padlocks from the rest of the bridge, she heads for Fühlingen under strange gathering clouds. She makes it to the house before the rain starts. Lounging on the sill of one of the front windows, she waits for Santi to arrive. Something odd is happening outside. Rain is falling, but not only rain: something else, heavy and flopping, splattering messily on the overgrown driveway. Thora leans out of the window and watches in delight.

A few minutes later she sees Santi running across the garden, pulling up the back of his coat to shield his head. He appears on the stairs, panting and shaking himself off. “Thora,” he asks patiently, “why is it raining fish?”

“Because my approach is working.” She jumps down from the windowsill and comes to see what he was painting last time. A vague, impressionistic portrait of a man she doesn’t recognize: bearded, with long dark hair, veiled in shadows. “Who’s this?”

Santi steps back from the wall, tilting his head. “After we fell from the tower.” Thora notices he doesn’t say jumped. “I saw this face.”

Thora stares at him. “Really? I saw a face too.”

“The same one?” This version of Santi goes so swiftly from vague artist to laser-focused investigator. Thora supposes he’s had enough practice at being both.

She shakes her head. “The one I saw was definitely a woman. Also way less—Jesusy.” She wrinkles her nose. “Maybe we both just saw what we expected to see.”

“Why did you expect to see a woman?”

Thora shrugs. “Because whoever’s masterminding all this has to be pretty smart?”

Santi laughs, then closes his eyes, catching himself on the wall.

Thora frowns. “What’s wrong?”

Slowly, he opens his eyes. “Dizzy spell. I’ve been having them for a few lifetimes now.”

Thora watches him warily. “I’m hungry all the time,” she says. “No matter what I eat. I would have mentioned it before, but I was worried you’d tell me it meant something.”

Santi dips his paintbrush, giving her a tired smile. “Probably nothing good.”

Pushing down her disquiet, Thora moves past him to examine the walls. “You’re running out of space.” Almost every brick is covered. “Did you find your answer? Do you know who we are yet?”

He pauses, brush in midair. “I think so,” he says. “But you tell me.”

Thora takes in the gallery of their lives. Her eight-year-old self, wrapped in her father’s scarf, looking up at the false stars in the Odysseum. The two of them hunched over their computers in the astronomy lab, faces lit by the glow of their invented worlds. Santi, lost and homeless, searching a maze of streets for a sign that says WE ARE HERE. She looks back at him now: younger than he was then, but older, too, in a way only she can see.